If there is anything that we can learn from the Maya obsession with the cycles of time, it would be recapitulation on a grand scale. The Maya counted and kept track of 20 calendars or cycles of time. Many were connected to the pulse of the planets wandering the sky, which they saw with the naked eye; pretty easy to do when you don’t have street and city lights. The smallest circle of time is the day, and then through a succession of differing times related to number patterns they had a 260 day calendar. The sun moving through the year and Venus’ transit through an 8 year cycle all contributed to ceremonial cycles that allowed the Maya to reflect on what was, be present to what is and to wonder what was to come.
The long or deep count calendar has a 400 year ticking period with 13 of these adding up to a very long progression of time. Maya pointed to Dec 21st 2012 long ago for the simple fact that it aligned with events occurring during a reference point in the 9th century. This was the height of classical Maya culture. This was a time of kings and shaman dominating the political and economic landscape of the forests. The Maya had developed many of the things we associate with advanced culture. The study of the calendar, astronomy and the cycles of time was not the privilege of the many. It was the few that concerned themselves with this or even understood. Like today, physicists and astronomers spend hours understanding the universe, but not many average people spend that much time on quarks. And yet it is the work of those few astronomers that helped the Maya stay in tune with the pulse of time and the cycle of ceremony.
Dec 21st 2012 is an inevitable conclusion to a calculated set of time cycles. It just marks a tick on a greater scale than a year or a Venus cycle. But at the same time, the Maya celebrated and ceremonialized specific things when these cycles clicked over to the next start point or to zero time. They fundamentally shifted their view of the world or attempted to shift to a new paradigm in alignment with these long count cycles. The last 400 years has seen a number of amazing things. As a Toltec warrior, I see this as an appointment with power on a global scale, an appointment which requires recapitulation… and one that as a society we could benefit from deep reflection.
The last long count moment, the end of period 12, was 1610. What an amazing point in history. Galileo had proved that the sun was the center of the system. This was the beginning of the real split between religion and science. But concurrent with this was the rise of the middle class, the development of banking and the idea of factories and industry being a key to doing work better or easier. Printing and books were developed which led to newspapers. Energy demands shifted. It was a lack of wood in Europe that drove industrialists to venture more boldly into the newly discovered territories to create things, which would come back to feed European dominance of the globe. Though this is a Euro-centric review, it should be noted that it was the Eurocentric model that was exploding across the globe with trade and dominance over other parts of the world.
And so it is the shadow side of European culture that also spread across the world. The pressure cooker of centuries of dynastic wars mixed with an obsession with the one true religion which in and of itself was breaking apart. This conflict ridden, self-glorifying, self-important spirit of superiority spread like wild fire across the globe. It would eventually be adopted by every culture throughout the globe in some way or another. In 1610 this expansion had moved past its initial stages of introduction of disease to the new world and into pure socio-economic dominion of the world as a whole. This model of the taker culture in combination with a drive to shift our energy use and abuse has led to the very point we are in with history. We are a global dominator community.
In the past when something did not work for a culture, that culture died away and the people left to go somewhere else. They left, moved, shifted and recreated themselves. The Maya were no different. They up and left their golden age of kings from which the long calendar was discovered. They did so for the survival of the very people that were living within the confines of that out-moded pattern. Leaving a broken system is a time-honored tradition. The Chinese dynastic succession had a similar pulse. When the people were suffering too much, the dynasty fell, someone rose to new power and shifted the capital to another location.
Today our global community interconnected by communication lines, commercial global enterprises and global issues of the use of energy and economy is at the height of which the seeds can be seen from 1610. In essence nothing about those initial stages of the enlightenment has really changed in the past 400 years. We are simply using the same pattern but now all over the globe. The takers who spread over the world dominating the earth and sucking her dry of her resources so science and industry can consume our world has succeeded. The takers have won. There is nowhere to go. There is nowhere to leave, run off into the forest, cross a desert, or travel to the next moment to start with a new pattern. The only way to truly change is to recapitulate the very pattern in the place we are at as a globe.
And such is the real gift of the discoveries of John Major Jenkins the 2012 scholar. He has found the real reason we need to pay attention to Maya deep time and to the cycle ending date of Dec. 21st 2012. That we must take a deep look at the patterns of our culture, economy, global banking, the factory model, scientific dominion, and in general what it means to be a human community in the earth. We need to recapitulate as the Maya did giving up that which no longer serves the greater good of humans and life in general. We need to learn how to leave, to let go, to destroy so the next cycle can create a new paradigm of possibilities.
Toltecs recapitulate patterns and discover energy that is trapped in old patterns. We search out that energy to help us re-focus our energy towards freedom and awareness of possibilities. This critical time offers us a moment to build up to. It offers us, if we look at it from a Maya perspective, a time to sacrifice that which no longer serves us. To un-bury the hidden bundle which is deep within the earth (aka our connection to the earth) and look at our relationship to energy. Then it is time to leave the taker mentality and create something new, free, more aware.
This is not something that governments and banks and industry is going to do. No they are stuck in the pattern of doing the same thing because it has worked for 400 years. It is something that arises from all people individually. It is a global ceremony of letting go of what does not work. Voting with feet… or really our energy, dollars, work, loves, homes, values and choices. Taking the bull by the horns, every person in the world can affect change through seeking out those patterns and destroying what no longer works. Recapitulate, pull the energy away from those patterns… for it is not the endings which we are reminded of in these times, but what are we going to do with the beginnings…..?
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“It’s because we simply cheated ourselves all the way down the line. We thought our lives, by analogy, was a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose by the end. The point was to get to that end, success or whatever, or maybe heaven after you are dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and we were supposed to sing or dance, while the music was being played.” OTT – One day I wish to have this kind of time.
